Description: Two influential academic leaders, both holding a significant place in MIT's history, reflect on efforts to achieve gender equity in science and engineering at MIT and other institutions of higher learning.

"In spite of steps to promote diversity, underrepresentation of women at all faculty levels persists," says Shirley Ann Jackson. She admires MIT's decade"plus work on these issues, which spurred much broader self" scrutiny and policy changes among research universities, yet notes that "we're still a long way from gender equity in science and engineering." Jackson says, "Not knowing, not understanding and not intending do not get us off the hook. We're still responsible for bias that puts obstacles in front of talented, capable people." This is not merely a moral problem, Jackson says, but a practical one, too, because society cannot afford to deny itself the expertise of so many competent people "when we face immense global challenges."

At every step of the way, from entering college as a science or engineering major, sticking with a course of studies through graduate school, and then attaining tenure, women need "bridges" to help them get to the next level, whether through mentors, flexible tenure clocks or childcare. Jackson notes that the "unequal burden of family turns gaps in the road into chasms." She detects new hurdles on the horizon as well: family and gender issues are still viewed as "women's issues," at least beyond MIT; and economic pressures may create resistance to gender bias measures. Jackson also points to the phenomenon of "pink collar discrimination," where salary levels drop in some fields such as biomedical engineering as women's numbers approach men's, suggesting that women may be undervalued, or lack tough salary negotiating skills. Jackson believes social networks may be key to introducing the next generation to science and engineering, and helping women establish and maintain careers.

Speaking "as a white male," Charles Vest says men of his generation in academia assumed that "if you filled the undergraduate pipeline," you'd solve the problem of underrepresentation of women in science and engineering professions. The reality was different, admits Vest, because even if 50% of the undergraduates in these fields were women, many fewer ended up with careers in science and engineering. Vest describes the data"driven studies conducted at MIT, and the groundbreaking policies that followed, which led to advances in bolstering and retaining numbers of women graduates and faculty. He points to similar ventures at other universities.

But for all the work to address gender issues in academia, major leaks persist in the pipeline. He displays national data showing how the number of women Ph.D.'s has grown enormously in life sciences in the past decade, but lags greatly in physical sciences and especially in engineering. A recent study showed that only 1.6% of all female university graduates are engineers, which greatly disturbs Vest: "This is not a number that can sustain our society going into the future." Ultimately, he says, "Numbers really do matter," because "we have to achieve critical mass before the culture starts to change."

About the Speaker(s): Ian A. Waitz was named Dean of Engineering in February 2011. He also serves as the Director of the Partnership for AiR Transportation Noise and Emissions Reduction (PARTNER), an FAA/NASA/Transport Canada"sponsored Center of Excellence. His principal areas of interest are the modeling and evaluation of climate, local air quality and noise impacts of aviation.

Waitz has written approximately 75 technical publications, including a report to the U.S. Congress on aviation and the environment. He holds three patents and has consulted for many organizations. During 2002"2005 he was Deputy Head of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He has also served as an associate editor of the AIAA Journal of Propulsion and Power. In 2003, Waitz received a NASA Turning Goals Into Reality Award for Noise Reduction. He was awarded the FAA 2007 Excellence in Aviation Research Award. He is a Fellow of the AIAA, and an ASME and ASEE member. He was honored with the 2002 MIT Class of 1960 Innovation in Education Award and appointment as an MIT MacVicar Faculty Fellow in 2003.

Waitz received his B.S. in 1986 from the Pennsylvania State University; his M.S. in 1988, from George Washington University; and his Ph.D.in 1991, from the California Institute of Technology.

Description: It's difficult to imagine that at one point in her career, National Academy of Science member Nancy Hopkins thought to quit. In her talk, she relates the historical challenges facing women in science and engineering at MIT, the university's responses to these problems, and how in the end Hopkins avoided becoming a poster child of the 'leaky pipeline' -- a term of art for the high rate of attrition among talented women in engineering and science academia.

Hopkins weaves together a personal tale with the larger story of gender discrimination in U.S. academia. She first captures a century of women at MIT, from the handful of female admissions starting in the late 19th century, to the current numbers: 45% of all undergraduates, 29% of graduate students and 17% of the faculty. However, there were no women science or engineering faculty in the first 100 years. During this period, the exclusion of top"notch women researchers from major academic posts was common, says Hopkins, a reflection of the fact that "societal beliefs can overpower merit." A major turning point arrived in the 1960s and 1970s, when the civil rights and women's movements flung open workplace doors to women.

But Hopkins notes that even after passage of laws against overt job discrimination, obstacles emerged to the advancement of women scientists and engineers, "unanticipated and largely invisiblealmost as effective at excluding women as the fact they couldn't get a job at all." There was sexual harassment, which "made it impossible for women to be equal in the workplace." Hopkins recalls in her undergraduate days grossly inappropriate behavior toward her by a Nobel Prize"winning biologist in a Harvard lab, but "didn't grasp until years later that a man who treats a student that way may not be genuinely interested in her lab notes." Mentors who could smooth the way to the next career step were few and far between for women students and young faculty. And unlike men, women have to choose between children or career. Hopkins says "women in my generation instinctively never talked about pregnancy or children at workYou wanted to make sure people knew you wanted to be a nun of science, and in fact personally, I was." Hopkins cites as well "unconscious gender bias," where women's research appeared to colleagues of both genders less valuable than identical research by a man, and accompanying marginalization in university departments. Up against these problems, who could blame women for departing their professions, asks Hopkins.

At MIT, serious relief arrived in 1994, after Hopkins, demoralized after trying in vain to obtain more lab space for her zebrafish experiments, found similarly unhappy women colleagues who banded together to press for institutional solutions. Hopkins literally went about measuring lab space and provided hard data about gender bias to then MIT President Charles Vest, as evidence that women had less space available to conduct their research. (This "tape measure" turning point has earned Hopkins an unintended place in MIT history, while the tape measure itself is on display at the MIT Museum.)

In stages, over the subsequent years, MIT began intensively recruiting women scientists and engineers for its faculty; creating new family leave policies; and placing women in top administrative roles, among a number of remedies. 19% of science faculty are now women, and surveys show a much higher level of satisfaction among this group. But Hopkins says the job is not yet finished: Women at MIT, from students to faculty, report "the perception that when women advance, it is due to the lowering of standards." The leaky pipeline won't be fixed until "this insidious belief that women are less good than men" vanishes within MIT and society at large.
http://museum.mit.edu/150/71

About the Speaker(s): Nancy Hopkins earned widespread recognition for cloning vertebrate developmental genes. Using a technique called insertional mutagenesis -- designed for such invertebrate animals as the fruit fly -- Hopkins's laboratory has cloned hundreds of genes that play a role in creating a viable fish embryo.

Hopkins' research earned her 1998 election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1999 election to the Institute of Medicine and 2004 election to the National Academy of Sciences. She speaks frequently about gender equity issues in science.

Hopkins obtained a B.A. from Radcliffe College in 1964 and a Ph.D. from the department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at Harvard University in 1971.

Host(s): Office of the President, MIT150 Inventional Wisdom

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Fri, 16 Dec 2011 18:32:23 -0500http://techtv.mit.edu/videos/16768-the-status-of-women-in-science-and-engineering-at-mit
http://techtv.mit.edu/videos/16768-the-status-of-women-in-science-and-engineering-at-mit
The Status of Women in Science and Engineering at MIT
MIT World — special events and lectures